Google's latest offering promises "a personal communication and collaboration tool" and was announced by them at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. Being a Google tool it is a fully web-based computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It is designed as a collaborative, real time interactive tool that not only allows conversations but full document collaboration. We are currently testing the product but all initial impressions are positive!
The "wave" component is a new term for what Google calls "equal parts conversation and document". Conversation are stored as threads in a forum style layout but display real time updates and conversations in a fully searchable format. If you imagine all the verbal conversations you have had in the past they all (to a lesser or greater extent) entailed the conversation itself, things that were referred to (external resources), documents discussed (text, maps, images etc), people discussed who may also have joined and left the conversation as it occurred, decisions made and action steps agreed upon. In Google Wave all of these assets (for want of a better word) are collated under a titled "Wave". Some of these assets would also have been utilized or referred to in other conversations and Google Wave lets you cross correlate those items as well.
Google Wave is written in Java and utilises OpenJDK. Its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Google intends to release the source code as a public open source resource allowing other developers to create their own Wave services as well. There are also Third Parties working on commercial plugins as well.
I will post more as I continue my journey down the Google Wave rabbit hole!
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